Our History: How to die? Let me count the ways

ALATIE --Improved medicines, better doctors, and attention to diet and exercise have done much to eliminate illness and prevent death.

If you're feeling poorly today, be grateful you're not living in Valatie in the past, when the ways to depart were numerous, as recounted by newspapers:

TYPHUS

Five of Valatie's residents came down with "typhus fever" in 1892, and all of them were "Russian Hebrews."

As noted in a recent Greenbush Life article, Jewish immigrants were brought upstate from crowded New York City, in part to protect them from communicable diseases.

"The village is wild with excitement," declared The Rockland County Journal.

"The board of health has done nothing in the matter for four days [because] no physician can be induced to attend the victims."

The symptoms of the disease were not pleasant to read about, much less have: chills, confusion, cough, delirium, 104-degree fevers, joint pain, low blood pressure, a rash that begins on the chest and spreads to the rest of the body, severe headaches, severe muscle pain and stupor (source: National Institutes of Health).

The five had all arrived in America on the same ship, Massilia, a commonality that raised suspicion they had contracted typhus at sea. (In 1896, small pox broke out on the same ship.)

Besides family members, among those exposed to the disease were fellow Jews and workers at the cotton mill where the sick people worked.

PTOMAINE

In 1903, Alice Pulver took to her sick bed in Valatie for several days. The cause was ptomaine poisoning, thought to be the result of eating "a quantity of cooked canned tomatoes, of which she was very fond."

She went to work the day after gorging on the "maters," but she was "taken so ill that she had to be carried home."

Ptomaine poisoning, an expression rarely used in the 21st century, was a catch-all term for food poisoning caused by bacteria.

COAL GAS

A year after Alice's malady, James Chesterman, "one of the wealthiest and most prominent citizens of Valatie," according to a newspaper, was discovered dead in bed in his home.

What happened?

The article speculated that "on Monday a new fire was started in [his] house, and it is supposed that coal gas caused his death and nearly asphyxiated" his maid, Bertha Hagadorn.

She had discovered his corpse and then passed out.

Nineteenth-century homes heated by coal gas could be lethal when too much carbon monoxide built up.

LEAD

In this case, the lead was not in the lining of a can but in the barrel of a revolver.

In 1910, a Valatie farmer named Stephen Johnson "met his wife on the road between Kinderhook and Valatie," reported The Kingston Daily Freeman, "and fired at her several times.